High Stakes

 

Queen's Line small farm times were wonderful, wonderful times. I miss them with a never-ending ache within me. I already missed them 15 years ago. There was a community spirit in that time gone by that cannot be even mimicked today. As those Gentleman Farmers were all gradually called Home, our way of life slowly but surely changed, and not at all for the better. Neighbours helping neighbours was a given, not an exception. If I could turn the clock back to those halcyon days of my youth and vigor, and wonderment of discovery, filled with so many shining role models, I would, and in a heartbeat.

I miss the sound of cows bawling on every farm, gas tractors, square balers lunging, and neighbour farmers yelling "WHOA!!!" at the top of their lungs when the baler ran out of twine, or the knotter stopped tying, or a string broke. When a cloud lazily drifted overhead from the West on a hot summer's hay day, you knew the farmers up the road had been treated to its cool, refreshing shade before it got to you. And you could bet the neighbours down the road were just as eagerly watching it approach as you were and would soon be feeling the welcome blessing of it too. Unless we were broke down, a hay day had about half of us out there at any given time, going for all we were worth. If we weren't out there we were fretting about not being out there while we were trying to fix what was keeping us from being out there.

A water break every few rounds made the sun and the heat and the chaff and the profuse sweating from the hard work bearable. As we got bigger and stronger with each passing year, it went from hard work to a hard workout as we yelled at the driver to go up another gear. We flexed our muscles between bales and relished our strength and stamina. We grinned broadly with delight at how fit and capable we were. After a few hot laps around the field with a load built in record time, we let out a, "WOOO!!!" whoop of pumped up exhilaration and adrenaline at the feat. Nothing makes you healthier than baling hay; I... mean... NOTHING. A few thousand bales of hay handled a few times over will make your heart and lungs strong, your arms and back powerful, your waist thin, your thighs full, and your skin tough and thick. It'll put callouses on your hands like shoe leather, and you'll have a grip like a vise. Your hair will be bleached and your hide tanned like an old work boot and the whites of your eyes clear and your pupils bright and shiny. You'll come in from the field with the appetite of at least two ordinary people your size. And still be ready and able to work or play hard for hours after supper. Nothing can replace that experience, and the sense of accomplishment and deep, inner, genuine satisfaction that came with it. Hard physical work and animal husbandry responsibility in youth go hand in hand to create an adult of strong, reliable character; parental material for future generations.

I greatly fear what will happen to society when I see all the lazy, pampered, soft-palmed youth of today, totally absorbed in something that only weighs 8 ounces. They would call Children's Services themselves in a moment if they were even asked to take out the garbage. The 12 year old farm girls of my youth would work circles around the 18 year old pasty-faced cell phone sissy boys of today while hardly breaking a sweat. That's not progress. Not by a long shot.

I miss the crisp, super-fresh smell of sisal baler twine, the uniform look of a properly cut field, the sound of a well-tuned baler, the feel of a bale made with the right tension in my hands, the motion of a hay wagon under my feet, the sun on my back and the sweat on my brow. And the power and energy that coursed through my veins and shone out my confident, grinning, youthful, healthy farmboy face. That was LIVING, boy; FULL THROTTLE. We boasted about the size of our loads, the quality of the build, the weight of the bales, the number of wagons we loaded in an afternoon, and the gear we had the driver going in. That was our work. It was our livelihood and we took pride in it and we took it seriously. My powerful Dad could still VERY capably handle square bales into his late-80's. We didn't do nearly as much by then, but it was always nice to have several hundred put away in case of a loader tractor breakdown in the winter or a bad blizzard where we wanted to feed the cattle indoors.

The advent of the round baler on the small farm was also the death knell of the square one. And all the hard work that went with it. We certainly welcomed it for the speed and ease of labour and the surety of getting the crop. But our physical condition did suffer for it. Gone was the fierce summer long workout in the blistering heat for us, and we have never been such fine physical specimens since. Still strong, still fit, but not to the premium level of those times.

One time Cory and I were at the Renfrew Fair. Cory got a job in the midway. He was managing the sledgehammer game, if I remember correctly. I idly hung around, with nothing better to do because I had no money. We got into quite a misunderstanding over the game's money with one of the carney guys. Cory's Mom had a booth in a nearby building for her flower arrangement shop. The carneys didn't give Cory a float in his apron pouch, so his Mom gave him some small change to get started. When Cory had enough in his pouch to keep going, he sent me back to his Mom with her seed money. The carney guy saw what we were doing, not that we had anything to hide, and drew the wrong conclusion. He skizzed out and actually threatened us with a hammer. He was mistaken, of course, because we weren't that way, but he never apologized when we had proof. We didn't care for that much. He was strong looking, with big biceps and we took him to be possibly loose a screw or two due to him openly threatening us with a claw hammer in full public view. I suppose, in the clearer view of hindsight, that might have been the sign of someone with nothing to lose, and you should have pity on such a one as that. We were too young to understand that then, though.

That evening, Cory and I were employed to help tear down the rides and game tents. We were getting 15 dollars apiece for it, which was big bucks to us, so they had us at their total disposal. The dude that threatened us with the hammer tried to pull out a steel stake and couldn't do it. I grabbed a hold of the stake myself, and he snorted; "Never mind--you'll never pull that out". Cory immediately broke into a grin. He knew what was coming. The gauntlet had just been dropped. And I picked it up. My best friend had seen my strength before, and he also knew that, under a challenge like that, I'd either pull that stake all the way out, or I'd die trying. I gripped that stake and started to pull. It was for sure in there, but I'm Scottish, and that means two things: Strong and Stubborn. There was no way I was letting that guy be right, especially after threatening the two of us with a hammer earlier. I bore down, and got into a power squat stance. The fall ground around the stake was well compacted by all the vehicular and foot traffic, but I wasn't stopping. I could feel the veins bulging out all over my body. My head and neck must have been as red as a beet. Cory stood there watching, relaxed, and in total confidence. I felt cartilage pop in different places in my body, but my power was coming on through my resentment of being told I couldn't do it by someone like that. Gradually the stake started to move. My hands never slipped once; remember that farmboy grip I mentioned earlier? A cone of earth rose up around the stake as I slowly drew it up, then ripped it the last 8 or 10 inches out of the ground, and triumphantly stood up with it in my hands. I turned, and roughly tossed it to the carney dude, who was standing there with his mouth agape. He looked strong, but I was John Wesley Bowes's son, and, brother, I WAS strong. There's a difference and that guy just found it out for himself. He realized then and there that, without his hammer, he would have been barking up the wrong tree. And there were two of us to deal with, because one would never leave the other one. You'd just make the second one madder if you hurt his friend. The moral of the story is: Don't mess with a farmboy.